How early should we try to put ourselves on a specific career track? Is it best to just keep pursuing research and publishing papers even if you are more interested in teaching, doing instrumentation or working with the public? Or is it better to try pursuing specific experiences which will help you in your goals even if they mean publishing fewer papers?

carolynn.moore wrote:Is there a resource somewhere that allows people to search for job possibilities within a certain location or type of career path?

I don't think the tool exists to do this. But maybe one thing that might help is the non-academic astronomers network:http://www.aas.org/career/nonacademic.php
It has listings of people who have education in astronomy but haven't followed the academic path. Many are still working in astronomy. This information might be helpful and you could find contacts for places that you are interested in.

carolynn.moore wrote:Is there a resource somewhere that allows people to search for job possibilities within a certain location or type of career path?

I don't think the tool exists to do this. But maybe one thing that might help is the non-academic astronomers network:http://www.aas.org/career/nonacademic.php
It has listings of people who have education in astronomy but haven't followed the academic path. Many are still working in astronomy. This information might be helpful and you could find contacts for places that you are interested in.

*waves at Carolynn from the upstairs of Keith Spaulding*

Things to keep in mind with the "non-academic" astronomers thing is that the definitions are wide. Some people consider non-academic to be most of what Space Telescope or the Spitzer Science Center do as you don't teach and don't have to deal with students (if you so choose). So don't count things like that out. I actually found I really liked doing support stuff when I worked there as it gave me new problems to wrap my head around on a regular basis.

Plus. . .working in astronomy means we have a lot of options open to us. With signal processing experience you could get jobs (though many in the states are contractors with the military so selling your soul might be in the cards there) but with image processing we are quite applicable to the remote sensing community as we just point our cameras away from the Earth rather than away.